So First Of All, I Just Want To Make It Clear: That Post Is, Objectively Speaking, Correct. Every Sentence

So first of all, I just want to make it clear: that post is, objectively speaking, correct. Every sentence here is correct. Watching other people have sex will not inherently do any of those things to you, and it is not an act with an inherent moral value.

But. But but but but but.

Do NOT try and take that to say that consuming pornography can never cause damage to the consumer. And it can, also, given specific circumstances (especially with teenagers), do the specific things that OP was explaining are not intent risks of watching pornography. I can literally tell you from experience that every time I was spiraling and using porn as a cope, it WAS rotting my brain (as in, it became my go-to instinct whenever I was alone and wanted to feel less disassociated and dead inside, and then ended up feeling even more disassociated and dead inside every time it was over, and then repeat until I kicked myself out of that loop), and it WAS objectively addictive (as in, I kept going back to it even as it continued to make my mental state worse), and it DID ruin my view of sex (as in, it made me go and do sexual stuff with people I wasn't attracted to or actually interested in, just because I came to associate sex with the momentary distraction from how awful my life was feeling, so I came to put myself in situations that I found genuinely boring and disgusting and just... Assumed that the satisfaction from the status of "teen with a sexual history" and knowing you're breaking a rule was a normal thing to be the only thing you want from sex AND IT TOOK ME LITERAL YEARS TO REALIZE SEX COULD ACTUALLY BE FUN AND NICE), so, like... It is genuinely upsetting to see people trying to turn "the harms that can be caused by sexually explicit contents are overblown and essentialized" into "religious guilt is the only reason it could ever make you feel bad and you need to get over that". And again, I'm not saying that it's damaging in every single context, there definitely were times in my life in which I was consuming specific forms of sexually explicit content and it wasn't wrecking my brain, but I think that pornography can mainly be a risk to your mental health if, like... It makes you feel sexually disassociated and numb and still come back to it. That's mostly where I think it can hurt you. And the people trying to crash the nuance in this just annoy me so much.

Let's try again since radfems are stupid.

There is nothing about *looking* at sex that is any morally different to engaging in sex. Adding a camera does not affect morality either. It will not rot your brain or make you an addict or force you to change your views on sex or mess with your brain chemicals and bonds with people or any other bullshit that people come out with. Sex is ok to look at.

Like, I'm actually begging you people. Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro literally have YouTube accounts at this second. So do Pearl Davis, and the Rubin report, and Paul Joseph fucking Watson. And you guys could report all of them in a minute, and you CHOSE not to, so forgive me for not believing that you actually care about stopping bigoted ideology from spreading.

I love how some of you guys think that engaging with anything Harry Potter related is going to "give jkr more exposure", as if not LITERALLY EVERYONE HAS ALREADY BEEN EXPOSED TO IT, and that making sure you don't pay her any money personally is going to move a single cent away from everything she was already going to put whatever amount of money she was planning to for either way when she's A LITERAL BILLIONER, and then try to cry "collective action" as if that's a battle any of you could ever win in your fucking lifetime, and then NOT try and tell people to mass report far-right influencers with an actual massive reach off of YouTube and TikTok, where their content independently moves towards people who, and this is true, MIGHT HAVE NOT BEEN POLITICALLY ENGAGED SO FAR. The hypocrisy just actually makes my blood boil. You guys don't know what practicality is and I'm starting to think I actually hate you for that.

There's a reason both Tumblr and 4chan have memes about how autistic everyone is, okay? And it's not good. Autistic people are not immune to radicalization, in fact we are more vulnerable to it than most people. When you have a harder time communicating with the outside world, simplistic behavioral instructions can be relieving, even when what they do is enforce a moral framing that is incredibly damaging both to you and to the people in your life.

godddd for the last time. a strong sense of justice in autistic people is not always a positive trait. its just a trait. a strong sense of justice does not mean that you are the most objective source on morality, it means you can’t let go of what you believe is right or should be done. autistic people aren’t morally superior or more socially intelligent than allistic people, you guys have GOT to stop acting like its progressive to decide a certain neurotype is the one everyone should default to.

he's like a stress ball to me.

You know what? I'm starting to think that stories about mental illness maybe SHOULD all end on an inspirational, uplifting note.

You see, I was just trying to hold in my mind a model of "even if you fell down, you can get back up, even if your life's a wreck, you can always go and do the work to make it better", just to try and convince myself to maybe not fall apart, and then my brain was just flooded with images of all the stories that ended in suicide (or better yet, heroic self-sacrifice that redeemed them from ever needing to be given a real chance), and I just felt that sinking dread that whispered "it doesn't matter what you do, it's all gonna end the same way... And hopefully sooner rather than later. You can imagine it all going quiet, and dark, and peaceful." And I just... I know you guys hate when the representation you see is just ✨inspiration porn✨, and that it feels good to see all the darkest impulses of your brain recognized and validated, but, like... Maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe we SHOULD have our representation be inspirational and uplifting, even when our reality is not, because representation is not a neutral factor. It affects how people think, and it especially affects how people think when they're spiraling and desperately looking for a frame of reference and you address them directly.

Look, what I'm trying to say is, it's not great when the most encouraging representation I can find is from fix-it-fics that were written by people who were sad that their favorite character didn't make it.